Greens - the UKIP of the left?

We already have a radical left alternative to UKIP's unpleasant populism, but that doesn't mean there is nothing to learn from them.

Over
the past 12 months, there have been repeated calls for a ' UKIP of the left'.
Including from prominent voices such as John
Harris in the Guardian, from the New Statesman, and more. The latest is
Simon Jenkins, writing
in the Guardian. His article (Jan 24)
supportive of the Brighton Green administration's referendum on increasing
Council Tax (to preserve vital services that government cuts are endlessly
squeezing) is welcome. His claim that the Greens are 'the UKIP of the left' however requires further examination.

Jenkins
makes the claim on the purported basis that the Greens are in the pockets of
big renewables tycoons. This claim is very odd, not least because the main
renewable-energy-based ethical companies are still just minute Davids compared
to the Goliaths of the Big Six. It is true that Good Energy and Ecotricity,
because their energy sources are not finite fossil fuels but on the contrary
are becoming cheaper to harness all the time, have been able to freeze their
prices this winter, unlike the Big Six; but they are still so small in
comparison that words like 'tycoon' are absurd misrepresentations of them.

Moreover,
there are extremely striking and basic differences in style and nature between
UKIP and the Green Party. For example, unlike us, UKIP are an anti-scientific
party in denial about basic realities of our time such as the limits to growth
of which global over-heat is only the most pressing example; UKIP even want to ban
the teaching of climate science in schools. Moreover, unlike us, UKIP lack
internal party democracy. And they actually are
rather beholden to tycoons: the few rich men who fund them.

Nevertheless,
despite these profound differences, and a diametric opposition in fact between
the values and policies of UKIP and the Greens, there is something intriguing
and attractive about Jenkins's characterisation. UKIP and the Greens share in
common that we are both outsiders to the political establishment, that we are
gaining support because people are fed up with the inauthenticity of
business-as-usual politicians from the old parties, and that we want to see a
radical shake-up of the current political settlement.

But
it is of course UKIP who have leaped ahead of us in the polls over the last
year, pressing their simple messages of blaming the EU and blaming immigrants
for problems fundamentally due to neo-liberalism. Perhaps Jenkins is even more
correct in his assertion than he realises: perhaps the Green Party needs to
find ways of simplifying and streamlining its popular appeal, rather than
sticking closer to a softly-softly rational approach of intelligent
policy-based and evidence-based discourse. Perhaps we Greens need to find
better ways of connecting with people where they are, while offering steady
leadership and a confident assertion of a better future. A better life, with
greater quality, that can replace the problems that currently envelop
our world and the dire future that looms on business-as-usual scenarios.

A
start might be for the Greens to make more starkly clear than we have been
doing recently that the only way you can truly care for your kids is by
thinking much more long term, as Green policies do. A 'UKIP of the left', in
the age of dangerous climate change - the 'anthropocene age' - might then start
by asserting that we hold this simple truth to be self-evident: that all
human beings are equal, including the countless humans of generations to
come. Such that climate-denial, fracking, coal, and going nuclear are all
nothing less than crimes against humanity - crimes against your
children.

But
here is also where it gets complicated. For thinking of our responsibility to
generations other than our own is hardly the preserve uniquely of the left. In
making the suggestion that a popular appeal (with a values base that will work
for us) to taking the future seriously--an appeal based in the simple but
profound point that in order to take our love for our children seriously we
must act so as not to compromise the future of their children, and so on, ad infinitum---I have leant on the
fundamental egalitarianism and 'societarianism' of the left, historically. On
the thought that, having absorbed ideas such as material equality and gender
equality, we next need to take on board and actually practice the idea of
inter-generational equality. But I might just as easily have leant on the
fundamental long-duree thinking of the right. On (say) Burke's idea that
society is not literally a contract of any kind, but rather a taking seriously
of our responsibility to both uphold the past and allow and create the future; on
the care and communitarianism that the right has traditionally upheld.

Now,
this legacy of the right has been utterly compromised, both by the right's
apologia usually for inherited privilege and inequality, and by the
displacement of conservatism as a philosophy by neo-liberalism. But the legacy
of the left has been profoundly compromised too: by an unworkable obsession
with planning, by its presentism and productivism (which has radically curtailed
its potential greenery), and by its sellout to neoliberalism.

Socialism
and conservatism have become outmoded and have been replaced by neoliberalism.
But socialism and conservatism still have something important to teach us, as
I've indicated, while neoliberalism faces terminal crisis, with its bankruptcy,
its utter vulnerability to shocks, its antipathy to any true democracy, and
above all its systematic breaching of planetary limits. (And neoliberalism is
the bastard child of liberalism; this is partly why some are now talking of our
age as that of ‘post-liberalism’: see for some examples here
and here.

So:
should the Greens seek to become more of a UKIP of the left than we already
are? My answer, on balance, is yes. But if someone were to ask me, should the
Greens seek also to appeal to the Right--to voters who actually want to
preserve our green and pleasant land, to voters who actually wish to conserve things (nature, institutions),
who want to oppose 'development' (sic) where it is no longer needed ( e.g. most
of the south of Britain ), to those who want to express their care for the
future as well as their desire to preserve the best of the past--then my answer
would also be: yes.

Ecologism,
our philosophy as greens, is the true alternative to neoliberalism.
Synthesising the best of socialism, conservatism and what is salvageable from
liberalism (for example: the importance of civil liberties), it is the ideology
our time demands: See here for
detail on this.

Has
what I am saying become very remote to the aspiration above, of simple
messages, a more popular emotional appeal? Not necessarily. The straightforward
values-proposition of UKIP too is based in an underlying philosophy that
combines economic libertarianism with reactionary social values, appeals to
little-Englanderism and to anger and fear. UKIP are this country's 'Tea Party'.
As I've already suggested, we too can generate straightforward
values-propositions, straightforward messages, and resonant emotional appeals.
Care for people, for humans, whenever they will live, is the most obvious place
to start. The Greens are the true people's party. Thus:

- Generosity and decency towards refugees and
asylum-seekers and those immigrants who have joined our society as an absolute
(but: not an open door to immigration / an ‘open borders’
approach, because of the value that we attribute to stable and coherent
societies/communities, both here and abroad, and because of our recognition of
ecological constraints. Compare here the Green Party’s excellent
policies on migration and on population.

- Implacable opposition to the inhumanity of
corporate power and corporate 'personality': limited-liability corporations are
psychopaths.

- Passionate advocacy of public space and public
services: no compromise on health and banking and more as the common property
of all, rather than as privileges.

- Implacable opposition to energies and industries
that compromise the common home of our children, this country and this good Earth.

- A post-materialistic outlook that treats people
as neighbours, as citizens, as equals: not as 'consumers'.

And
then, perhaps, UKIP would meet its match, Labour would face a stronger
competitor that was actually on the Left, and the true conservatives out
there would finally perhaps have someone to vote for again.

That
sounds to me like a start.

About the author

Dr. Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. He was a two-term elected Green Party councillor in Norwich. He now Chairs the Green House think tank.

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